Macaulay Night at the Museum: The aftermath

So when I first heard about the “Macaulay Night at the Museum” I thought we were having a sleepover. I honestly believed the entire 400+ Macaulay students were going to bring sleeping bags and camp out underneath the paintings of Van Gogh and watch the cinema classic  that is “Night at the Museum.” I was quickly informed that my feetie pajamas would not be  necessary, and the event was redefined to me. Regardless of a sleepover or not I was excited to attend to event,  and once it was over I was more interested in art than I was before.

I liked how we were free to explore the museum and pick our own pieces of art to discuss.I saw certain groups gravitating towards the more obscure interesting works, while others wanted to discuss the more classical and traditional paintings. The Egyptian exhibit was my favorite out of all of them because the art itself was created for some purpose beyond simple aesthetics, and I could see how it was crafted by a human hand hundreds of years prior. The sarcophagi in my opinion were so cool and intricate that I probably could have spent the majority of the night looking at them. I had a fairly large group of six individuals, but we broke up into groups of three to discuss two different art pieces. My threesome observed an African tribal costume of fertility, and the other looked at a painting that symbolized the French Revolution (Vive la France!). At first the tape recorder was awkward to use, and there was a brief moment of panic where I thought I erased the entire six minute conversation, but after we all got into the art I found that the pressure of having something to say into the mic just fell away. I wished I had more time to look around the museum and talk to the other students because personally I didn’t get to meet as many people as I wanted to.  There were a lot of different styles of art that I didn’t know existed and I found myself constantly questioning how someone had the idea to make this? What inspired them, or what were they thinking when they created this work? I will look forward to other events like this, especially if it involves art because I now know how to actually talk about the work without trying to sound like an art critic. I heard a lot of other students saying that they want to tour the museum again on their own time to explore more and I feel the same way.

So in sum, I enjoyed my night at the museum even though it wasn’t a sleepover.